Feminist philosophy of language is characterized by attention to the social context of language use. This generally takes two forms. First, feminist philosophers have critiqued language itself, arguing that that various human languages masquerade as gender neutral while in fact encoding a world view on which maleness is the norm and women are either invisible or represented as the other. Second, they have critiqued analytic philosophy of language as itself displaying a male bias, and in particular as being driven by an overly individualistic picture of language use. This is not to say that feminist philosophers of language are not interested in meaning, reference, and truth. Rather, many would argue that these central topics in mainstream analytic philosophy of language cannot be properly investigated without attention to the social context in which language operates.

Key works

Language itself comes under fire in Moulton 1981 and Mercier 1995, which establish that terms like 'he' and 'man' do not have gender-neutral meanings and argue that treating them as gender-neutral, like use of gender-specific profession terms such as 'seamstress' or 'lady doctor' contribute to a general sense that maleness is the norm. Frye 1983 notes that the required sex-marking found in English and many other languages serves to make sex relevant where it need not be. Penelope 1990 and Spender 1985 go further, maintaining that the problem is not a particular collection of words, arguing instead that English quite generally encodes a male worldview, subordinates and renders invisible women, and takes males as the norm. Traditional analytic philosophy of language is charged with excessive individualism by Hintikka & Hintikka 1983 and Hornsby 2000, and Nye 1990 argues that philosophers of language have to their detriment not paid sufficient attention to either the political dimensions of language use or to actual failures of communication, preferring to concentrate on purely abstract problems of radical translation or reference across different worlds. Traditional speech act theory however has been put to use by a number of feminists: Langton & Hornsby 1998 use it to explicate Catherine MacKinnon's claim that pornography silences and subordinates women; Kukla 2014 develops a speech-act theoretic concept of discursive injustice.

What is it about the nude female body that inspires irrationality, fear, and pandemonium, or at least inspires judges to write bad decisions? This Article offers an analysis of the Supreme Court's nude dancing cases from a perspective that is surprising within First Amendment discourse. This perspective is surprising because it is feminist in spirit and because it is literary and psychoanalytic in methodology. In my view, this unique approach is warranted because the cases have been so notoriously resistant to (...) traditional legal logic. I show that the legal struggles over the meanings and the dangers of the gyrating, naked female body can be fully understood only when placed within a broader context: the highly charged terrain of female sexuality. By rereading the cases as texts regulating gender and sexuality and not just speech, a dramatically new understanding of them emerges: The nude dancing cases are built on a foundation of sexual panic, driven by dread of the female body. Ultimately, this analysis reveals a previously hidden gender anxiety that has implications not only for the law of nude dancing, but for First Amendment law more broadly. By presenting the ways in which irrational cultural forces shape the Court's supposedly rational analysis in the nude dancing cases, in the end I point toward an unusual conception of First Amendment law: Free speech law governs culture, yet in surprising ways, culture also governs free speech law. (shrink)

The first part of this paper will look at how essential features of power and authority affect the credibility of arguments. Empirical evidence from communication studies and feminist writings, such Sue Campbell, and Robin Lakoff, shows that there is inherent disparity in the reception of arguments when presented by men and women. The second part will aim to elucidate how this problem of lack of authority is not addressed by the ad verecundiam fallacy.

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis-"woman," "femininity," etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A "discursive" approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

Consider the following true stories: 1. Anne Cameron, a very gifted white Canadian author, writes several first person accounts of the lives of Native Canadian women. At the 1988 International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal, a group of Native Canadian writers ask Cameron to, in their words, "move over" on the grounds that her writings are disempowering for Native authors. She agrees. 2 2. After the 1989 elections in Panama are overturned by Manuel Noriega, U.S. President George Bush declares in (...) a public address that Noriega's actions constitute an "outrageous fraud" and that "the voice of the Panamanian people have spoken." "The Panamanian people," he tells us, "want democracy and not tyranny, and want Noriega out." He proceeds to plan the invasion of Panama. 3. At a recent symposium at my university, a prestigious theorist was invited to give a lecture on the political problems of post-modernism. Those of us in the audience, including many white women and people of oppressed nationalities and races, wait in eager anticipation for what he has to contribute to this important discussion. To our disappointment, he introduces his lecture by explaining that he can not cover the assigned topic, because as a white male he does not feel that he can speak for the feminist and post-colonial perspectives which have launched the critical interrogation of postmodernism's politics. He lectures instead on architecture. These examples demonstrate the range of current practices of speaking for others in our society. While the prerogative of speaking for others remains unquestioned in the citadels of colonial administration, among activists and in the academy it elicits a growing unease and, in some communities of discourse, it is being rejected. There is a strong, albeit contested, current within feminism which holds that speaking for others---even for other women---is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate.. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman’s ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of ‘uptake’ of the woman’s intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is (...) it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts. (shrink)

Let’s say that a philosophical theory is white just in case it treats the perspective of the white (perhaps Western male) as objective.1 The potential dangers of proposing or defending white theories are two-fold. First, if not all of reality is objective, a fact which I take to be established beyond doubt,2 then white theories could well turn out to be false.3 A white theory is unwarranted (and indeed false) when it treats nonobjective reality as objective. Second, by proposing or (...) defending unwarranted white theories one thereby treats the perspective of the non-white as faulty, and this in turn serves to perpetuate the distorted representation of whites as superior to non-whites. As David Owen puts it, [whiteness] serves to underwrite perceptions, understandings, justifications and explanations of the social order that perpetuate distortions in the social system that are a legacy of our nation’s history …what is associated with whiteness becomes defined as natural, normal or mainstream.4 In this chapter I will focus on a particular class of philosophical theories, viz. philosophical theories of color. I argue that realist theories of the objectivist variety.. (shrink)

Socialization enforces gendered standards of politeness that encourage men to be dominating and women to be deferential in mixed-gender discourse. This gendered dynamic of politeness places women in a double bind. If women are to participate in polite discourse with men, and thus to avail of smooth and fortuitous social interaction, women demote themselves to a lower social ranking. If women wish to rise above such ranking, then they fail to be polite and hence, open themselves to a wellspring of (...) social discord, dissention, and antagonism. The possibility for women’s politeness in mixed-gender conversation threatens more than cooperation, it undermines the possibility for self-respect and autonomy. (shrink)

SCHEMA If agency is not derived from the sovereignty of the speaker, then the force of the speech act is not sovereign force. The "force" of the speech act is, however incongruously, related to the body whose force is deflected and conveyed ...

In Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Susan Griffin's embedding of language and culture within the natural world implicitly offers a critique of widespread assumptions, shared by many feminists, that language belongs only to the powerful and that it is inherently violent. Griffin's depiction of the process through which women come to speech is illuminated by V. N. Vološinov's work on the multiaccentuality of language and by Trinh Minh-ha's characterizations of oral traditions. Both authors stress the constant re-creation of (...) language by speakers and listeners. (shrink)

I study the relations between language, logic and formal meaning structures as these concepts and relationships change during Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical career. I work from a feminist perspective on language and logic which assumes a posture of intellectual activism and which reads Wittgenstein's philosophy of language for a variety of purposes best characterized as cultural critique. ;The first two essays deal directly with logic, language, and formal meaning structures as these shape, and are shaped by, feminist thinking about philosophical problems (...) such as universalism, essentialism, sameness/difference, and epistemological perspective. In the second essay, contrasts between Wittgenstein's changing understandings of logic and the concept 'language games' are foregrounded. In conjunction with Wittgenstein's critical reassessment of his early philosophical thinking, I discuss Wittgenstein's concept 'family resemblance' and its interpretive relevance for feminist standpoint theory. ;The last two essays focus on the tasks of philosophy, especially Wittgenstein's radical understanding of philosophical methods, as well as the duty of philosophical reflection in times of "expert" discourses. Here the feminist approach is to broaden discussion of philosophy of language by moving away from narrow professionalized analytic considerations, toward more inclusive, democratic and professionally critical forms of interpretation of language use and modes of thinking. These considerations pay attention to the power-ful, often culturally dominant, nature of "expert" language games. Wittgenstein's understanding of 'will', 'limits', 'duty', and 'pride' anchor my arguments about the connections between philosophy as a study of language use/misuses and the philosopher as having a responsibility to circumscribe the power language usage entails. ;Wittgenstein's understanding of the fundamental significance of the charge to do honest philosophy--to stay aware of the various and powerful games we play with words--is a major feature of my arguments. How we carry out this charge substantially affects the power these games have over the public, common and democratic languages of a culture. The final essays, as well as the epilogue, use the feminist interpretation of logic and language set out in the first two essays to broaden the typical reach philosophy of language has had in helping build multicultural understandings of the public tasks of and uses for philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay we shall examine the contemporary jurisprudential thinking and legal precedents surrounding the issue of the sanctionability of pornography. We shall catalogue them by their logical presumptions, such as whether they view pornography as speech or act, whether they view pornography as obscenity, political hate-speech or anomalous other, whether they would scrutinize legislation governing pornography by a balancing of the harm of repression against the harm of permission, and who exactly they view as the victims.We shall take a (...) special interest in the most recent, but unsuccessful, attempt by a subgroup of feminists to proscribe pornography by treating it as neither political speech nor sexual speech but speech which causes harm which is both political and sexual. They would like it to be considered as a special kind of odious propaganda undeserving of protection because it promulgates a mental state conducive to criminal activity, and hence is criminal in and of itself. However, the repression of propaganda, even odious propaganda, is not so easily accomplished in this country. (shrink)

In both her fiction and her essays on writing and feminist theory, Monique Wittig takes up and redeploys traditional themes and genres as well as recent theories of language, literature, and writing in order to force change in and through the dominant categories of thought and language. She has announced her project as one which would "do away with the category of sex" by way of reconfiguring the grammatically and conceptually enforced compulsory heterosexual order. I examine the specific linguistic mechanisms (...) by which Wittig accomplishes this abolition of "sex" and the political/philosophical/linguistic consequences of her "lesbianization" of language. Through-out, I aim to suggest what the political importance of The Lesbian Body as a diversified and written corpus is. (shrink)

It is argued that the pronouns `she' and `he' are disguised complexdemonstratives of the form `that female/male'. Three theories ofcomplex demonstratives are examined and shown to be committed to theview that `s/he' turns out to be an empty term when used to refer toa hermaphrodite. A fourth theory of complex demonstratives, one thatis hermaphrodite friendly, is proposed. It maintains that complexdemonstratives such as `that female/male' and the pronoun `s/he' can succeed in referring to someone independently of his or her gender.This (...) theory incorporates: (i) a multiple proposition view, i.e., theview that an utterance of a sentence containing a complex demonstrativeexpresses two (or more) propositions, namely the background proposition(s)and the official one; (ii) that the referent of a complex demonstrativeis a component of the official proposition expressed whether it satisfiesthe nominal part of the demonstrative expression or not; (iii) that thenominal part of a complex demonstrative only affect the background proposition(s) and (iv) that the utterance inherits its truth-value onlyfrom the official proposition. (shrink)

light at the street level,1 bringing the streets out from the shadows. The effects of social progress are often even more significant than the effects of vertical progress, since social progress can be tradition-changing at various levels, bringing ...

In her signature style, revolutionary Mary Daly takes you on a Quantum leap into a joyous future of victory for women. Daly, the groundbreaking author of such classics as Beyond God the Father and The Church and the Second Sex , explores the visions of Matilda Joslyn Gage, the great nineteenth-century philosopher, and reveals that her insights are stunningly helpful to twenty-first-century Voyagers seeking to overcome the fascism and life-hating fundamentalism that has infused current power structures. Daly shows us once (...) again that Wild, Wise Women can learn to take charge of the current destructive patriarchal forces and use this as an Outlandish opportunity for change. (shrink)

Catharine MacKinnon claimed that pornography silence's women's speech where this speech is protected by free speech legislation. MacKinnon's claim was attacked as confused because, so it seemed, pornography is not the kind of thing that can silence speech. Using ideas drawn from John Austin's account of speech acts, Rae Langton defended MacKinnon's claim against this attack by showing how speech can, in principle, be silenced by pornography. However, Langton's defence requires us to deviate from a widely held understanding of what (...) kind of speech is protected; namely the expression of opinions, ideas, and thoughts. In this paper I provide an alternative defence of MacKinnon's claim which requires no such deviation. I argue that because the truth-conditions of sentences are context-sensitive it is possible for there to be contexts in which, when those in attendance believe rape myths, it is not possible to express certain opinions, ideas, or thoughts. Given that pornography is a significant contributor to rape myth acceptance, this argument addresses the accusation of confusion facing MacKinnon without the need for deviation. The cross-examination of a complainant in a rape trial is used as an illustration. (shrink)

Claudia Bianchi defends what she calls ‘MacKinnon's claim’: that ‘works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts of subordinating women, or illocutionary acts of silencing women’ in response to Saul , and by appeal to the formulations of Langton , Hornsby and Hornsby and Langton . I think Bianchi has two different claims in mind , and that it is important to distinguish the two, since the argument offered for either claim frustrates the aim sought by the other.Bianchi expresses (...) the first claim when she says ‘pornography is the subordination of women’, and that it subordinates ‘by conditioning people to regard women as willing sexual objects’ . Call this Subordination. She expresses the second claim when she says pornography ‘silences women’, and that it does so …. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the intersecting concerns of feminist theory and discourse ethics to make an argument for the ability of discursive universalism to include the concerns of women. Feminists have raised a number of objections to the cognitive and universal claims of moral proceduralism. These objections include arguments regarding the blindness of so-called "neutral" procedures to persons and contexts, the tension in the universality of an abstract and cognitivist morality which fails to value women's moral perceptions, the failure to acknowledge (...) difference which results in a conception of solidarity in terms of the sameness of "us" over and against a group of "them," also depicted as fundamentally the same, and, finally, the restriction of the notion of universality to the public sphere in contrast to a particular sphere of the private. I argue that Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics can provide a procedural account of morality which does not fall prey to these criticisms and which, in fact, can help us move beyond them. ;Accordingly, in examining the benefits of discourse ethics for feminist theory, I address recent work on application discourses which extends discourse ethics beyond justification to take into account the appropriateness of given norms in particular situations. I argue that the concept of application discourses helps us to resituate discourse ethics in the contextual realm of the everyday which has been stressed in feminist ethics. Additionally, my argument for discourse ethics stresses the limitations of the theory and its admitted fallibalism: all discourses are subject to the limits of language and our ability to create and use language in a way which enables us to understand, express and represent our needs. ;Taking up the importance of feminist theory for discourse ethics, I address the spaces for difference which appear in Habermas's theory once it is interpreted through a feminist lens. I argue that by opening up the concepts of the neutral observer to include the "she-perspective," the generalized other to include interpretations of generalized others and the conception of a democratic civil society to include women, we can enhance the plausibility of discourse ethics' claim to universality. (shrink)

In English, as in many other languages, male-gendered pronouns are sometimes used to refer not only to men, but to individuals whose gender is unknown or unspecified, to human beings in general (as in ―mankind‖) and sometimes even to females (as when the casual ―Hey guys‖ is spoken to a group of women). These so-called he/man or masculine generics have come under fire in recent decades for being sexist, even archaic, and positively harmful to women and girls; and advocates of (...) gender-neutral (or nonsexist) language have put forward serious efforts to discourage their use. Have they been successful, and to what extent? In this paper, I review some of the main arguments in favor of abolishing sexist male generics. I then present three studies tracking the use of he/man terminology in academic, popular, and personal discourse over the past several decades. I show that the use of these terms has fallen dramatically in recent years, while nonsexist alternatives have gradually taken their place. We may be paying witness to the early stages of the ultimate extinction of masculine generics. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses two concerns. First, is the regulation of a subset of hate-speech, namely 'assaultive expression', justifiable within the framework of current First Amendment jurisprudence? Second, should assaultive expression that targets the oppressed be regulated? ;The first concern addressed, namely whether the regulation of assaultive expression is justifiable, though at base descriptive, is examined by employing philosopher of language J. L. Austin's theory of performative speech acts and feminist philosopher Rae Langton's theory of subordinating and silencing expression in order (...) to explore whether regulating assaultive expression meets the two-pronged legal test of strict scrutiny. In order to meet the test of strict scrutiny, the regulation examined must, first, constitute a compelling state interest and, second, be narrowly tailored to meet the compelling interest. I argue that assaultive expression causes the other-regarding harm of either subordination or silencing. The first harm, subordination, is an infringement to the liberal right of equal status; the second harm, silencing, is an infringement of the liberal right of free expression: such other-regarding harms constitute compelling state interests as the liberal democratic state is obliged to protect the rights its citizens have to both liberty and equality. I further argue that legislation regulating assaultive expression is narrowly tailored just in case that the assaultive expression regulated subordinates or silences. This brings me to the second concern addressed, namely whether the state should regulate assaultive expression. I argue that the state's obligation to protect its citizens against the other-regarding harm of assaultive expression becomes more urgent in the case of targets of assaultive expression that are oppressed by virtue of group membership. While I do not hold that all assaultive expression should be regulated, I argue that there is a strong case to be made for regulating assaultive expression that targets the oppressed by causing or sustaining their oppression since the oppressed are the least likely to have the means to protect themselves from the harm such expression does. (shrink)

"Making Sense of Nonsense: Trivial Remarks on the Nature of Language" is an inquiry into the nature and significance of nonsense for philosophers and other human beings. Philosophers have been accused of indulging in nonsense. Wittgenstein complains that philosophers take language on holiday. If an utterance is nonsense in virtue of being on holiday, we might expect meaningful utterances to be meaningful in virtue of their being at work, at home. When we look at language at home, we find that, (...) despite the tribute philosophers of language ordinarily pay to the a priori, meaning is a most contingent and subjective family of phenomena. On the rough ground of everyday discourse, we find language stamped with the desires and agendas of certain groups of mammals. Language shows us its rough edges when we clear away the unarticulated presuppositions smuggled in by dominant philosophical methodology. There are a number of strategies for attaining an unclouded vantage point on language. One is to imagine oneself into the position of someone to whom our language and way of life is unfamiliar. Another is to actually occupy a point of view from which the language and way of life we take for granted begins to seem strange. ;The theory of meaning that emerges from the kind of attention to language here described can be stated thus: meaning is grounded in concernful engagement with the world. Or, to put it another way: we talk about what we care about. As a result, language can serve as a deep reserve of human history. What it tells us about ourselves is not always pleasant. As the language reveals the concerns and agendas of speakers, it reveals the imbalances and abuses of power among those speakers. Insofar as language constructs the worlds we inhabit, the injustices and prejudices we find in language are mirror images of reality as we know it. The good news is the liberatory potential of our realization of the extent to which meaning, and hence reality, are "man-made." This potential is realized in the work of many radical lesbian feminist philosophers. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not take its (...) wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

Two prominent philosophers here engage in a forthright debate over some of the centrally disputed topics in the political correctness controversy now taking place on college campuses across the nation, including feminism, campus speech codes, the western canon, and the nature of truth. Friedman and Narveson conclude the volume with direct replies to each other's positions.

Feminist authors claim that many of the advertising messages are promoting stereotypical images of the genders. However, if in social sciences, gender stereotypes have been facilitated and enforced by religious ideologies, the connections between gender stereotypes in advertising and religious ideologies remain to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these connections. Using the tools and methods of philosophy of communication, the paper attempts to emphasize a double discourse of advertising: an external one that derives from existing (...) religious ideologies, and an internal one that borrows the structure and elements of modern religiosity. If the first one is enforcing the gender stereotypes, the second one is more innovative and less related to stereotypical images of genders. When advertising is approached from the perspective of philosophy of communication, its most conspicuous aspect is its narrative dimension. One way in which narratives of advertising are constructed is in the form of myth. We can see that, in some circumstances, advertising has a function similar to myth, or includes structures of depth coming from the world of myth or of religion understood in a broader sense. The power of those elements is derived not from the realm of merchandise value, but from the one of traditional mentalities and cultural representations. In order to illustrate my research on the relation between gender, religion and advertising, I choose a sample of ads, that I analyze using the tools of philosophy of communication. Thus, my research has led me to a nuanced understanding of the relation between gender stereotypes and religion in advertising. (shrink)

Marilyn Frye's first book, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, presents nine philosophical lectures: four on women's subordination, four on resistance and rebellion, one on revolution. Its approach combines a lesbian perspective with analytical philosophy of language. The major contributions of the book are its analysis of oppression, highly suggestive discussions of the roles of attention in knowledge and ignorance and in arrogance and love, a defense of political separatism not based on female supremacism, and a development of (...) the idea of lesbian epistemology. Its proposal for resisting White racism will be controversial. Its treatment of gay rights is not balanced by an acknowledgement that drag queens, like "totaled women," are products of oppression, not simply of intolerance. The most philosophically problematic aspect of the book is its analysis of coercion and of the roles of coercion in women's subordination. This creates an unresolved tension with the positive message of the second half of the book. Despite this difficulty, these essays are an outstanding contribution to contemporary feminist theory. (shrink)

Claudia Bianchi defends what she calls ‘MacKinnon's claim’: that ‘works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts of subordinating women, or illocutionary acts of silencing women’ in response to Saul , and by appeal to the formulations of Langton , Hornsby and Hornsby and Langton . I think Bianchi has two different claims in mind , and that it is important to distinguish the two, since the argument offered for either claim frustrates the aim sought by the other.Bianchi expresses (...) the first claim when she says ‘pornography is the subordination of women’, and that it subordinates ‘by conditioning people to regard women as willing sexual objects’ . Call this Subordination. She expresses the second claim when she says pornography ‘silences women’, and that it does so …. (shrink)

The question which this paper examines is that of the correct scope of the claim that extra-linguistic factors (such as gender and social status) can block the proper workings of natural language. The claim that this is possible has been put forward under the apt label of silencing in the context of Austinian speech act theory. The ‘silencing’ label is apt insofar as when one's ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is ‘blocked’ by one's gender or social status (...) then one might justly be said to be silenced. The notion that factors independent of any person's linguistic competence might block her ability to exploit the inherent dynamic of language is of considerable social as well as theoretical significance. I shall defend the claim that factors independent of a person's linguistic competence can indeed block her ability to do things with words but I will show that the cases that have been previously considered to be cases of illocutionary failure are instances of rhetic or locutionary act failure instead. I shall refine the silencing claim as previously advanced in the debate in at least one fundamental respect. I also show that considering the metaphysics of speech acts clarifies many of the issues previously appearing as thorny bones of contention between those who hold that the only notion of silencing that is coherent is that of physically preventing someone from speaking or writing and those who hold the opposite sort of claim sketched above. (shrink)

In Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Susan Griffin's embedding of language and culture within the natural world implicitly offers a critique of widespread assumptions, shared by many feminists, that language belongs only to the powerful and that it is inherently violent. Griffin's depiction of the process through which women come to speech is illuminated by V. N. Vološinov's work on the multiaccentuality of language and by Trinh Minh-ha's characterizations of oral traditions. Both authors stress the constant re-creation of (...) language by speakers and listeners. (shrink)

Critique of Violence is a highly original and lucid investigation of the heated controversy between poststructuralism and critical theory. Leading theorist Beatrice Hanssen uses Walter Benjamin's essay 'Critique of Violence' as a guide to analyse the contentious debate, shifting the emphasis from struggle to dialogue between the two parties. Regarding the questions of critique and violence as the major meeting points between both traditions, Hanssen positions herself between the two in an effort to investigate what critical theory and poststructuralism have (...) to offer each other. In the course of doing so, she assembles imaginative new readings of Benjamin, Arendt, Fanon and Foucault, and incisively explores the politics of recognition, the violence of language, and the future of feminist theory. This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students of continental philosophy, political theory, social studies and comparative literature. Also available in this series: Essays on Otherness Hb: 0-415-13107-3: £50.00 Pb: 0-415-13108-1: £15.99 Hegel After Derrida Hb: 0-415-17104-4: £50.00 Pb: 0-415-17105-9: £15.99 The Hypocritical Imagination Hb: 0-415-21361-4: £47.50 Pb: 0-415-21362-2: £15.99 Philosophy and Tragedy Hb: 0-415-19141-6: £45.00 Pb: 0-415-19142-4: £14.99 Textures of Light Hb: 0-415-14273-3: £42.50 Pb: 0-415-14274-1: £13.99 Very Little ... Almost Nothing Pb: 0-415-12821-8: £47.50 Pb: 0-415-12822-6: £15.99. (shrink)

: Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.

As radical feminists seeking to overcome the linguistic oppression of women, Rich and Daly apparently shared the same agenda in the late 1970s; but they approached the problem differently, and their paths have increasingly diverged. Whereas Daly's approach to the repossession of language is code-oriented and totalizing, Rich's approach is open-ended and context-oriented. Rich has therefore addressed more successfully than Daly the problem of language in use.

How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gender as a central analytic category. In (...) particular, feminist philosophy has become established as a major field of inquiry, and it is now complemented by related emerging areas, including the philosophy of race and the philosophy of sex and love. For those working in Philosophy and Gender dizzying questions such as the following arise: What justifications were used historically for the exclusion or inclusion of women in political life, and what is their contemporary resonance? How is what counts as knowledge shaped by gender norms? What metaphysical questions about identity are raised by sex change? How might some feminist philosophies risk reproducing racist assumptions about what it means to be a woman, while some critical philosophies of race assume a masculine subject? What does it mean to say that moral theories are gendered? Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of—and to navigate around—an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Cressida J. Heyes, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. It features critical analysis of gender as it relates to philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, social and political thought, aesthetics, and philosophy of science; it is also distinctive in showing how feminist thought has been intertwined in both analytic and continental traditions. The collection reconfigures ‘gender and philosophy’ into an integrated field of inquiry while providing an invaluable resource for scholars in all disciplines who need to know how to think critically about gender. In so doing it responds to recent curriculum developments, while providing a crucial reference guide for theoretically minded scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Philosophy and Gender is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource. (shrink)